With these nearly mystical words, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, in a 'Circular Letter' of Christmas 1939 to the brethren of the Finkenwalde seminary and the pastors of the Confessing Church, describes the task of Christian theology in general and of Christology in particular: to praise the glory of God in the wonder of his incarnation.

It has become customary to regard Christology as the centre of Bonhoeffer's thought. And indeed, the question 'Who is Jesus Christ?' forms the cantus firmus of Bonhoeffer's theological development from the beginning to the end. This question, originally latent in Sanctorum Communio, becomes explicit in Bonhoeffer's academic Christology lectures of 1933, that crucial year of German history in the twentieth century when Hitler came to power. And still in 1944, in his Letters and Papers from Prison, the programmatic question Vho Christ really is, for us today' forms the starting point of Bonhoeffer's new theological reflections.

In these words of Dietrich Bonhoeffer we glimpse the creative centre of his paradigm for human behaviour within the church and the state. Through essays, letters and books he explored both traditional and experimental patterns of relating the church which he served to the state, especially the German state during the rule of Adolf Hitler and the Nazis (1933-45). Bonhoeffer's institutional vision, initially focused intellectually and geographically on central Europe, impelled him, particularly during his imprisonment (1943-45), into an expansive love for the world, 'the whole of human life in all its manifestations'.

The Canadian theologian Douglas John Hall discerns Bonhoeffer's 'theology of world-orientation' most vividly in the letters and papers penned in his Tegel prison cell. For Hall this Tegel theology constituted 'a fundamental break with the other-worldliness and world-ambiguity of conventional Christianity'. Yet, at the start of his career, Bonhoeffer had already displayed sensitivity towards the struggles of marginal groups in society (blacks in New York City and poor, troubled teenagers in Berlin), revealing his unwillingness to retreat from reality, even during the early 1930s. As soon as the Nazis began anti-Semitic persecution in April 1933, Bonhoeffer was one of the first Christian theologians to focus on the Jewish issue as central in the church struggle (Kirchenkampf), both within the German Evangelical (Protestant) Church itself and in its fight against Nazi control.

Those whose only acquaintance with Dietrich Bonhoeffer is limited to his exciting affirmation about 'Christian secularity' in the prison letters and his inspirational role in the plot to kill Hitler are often astonished to learn that he was also a man of daily, at times childlike, prayer. Some early analysts of Bonhoeffer's theology did, in fact, dismiss his most directly 'spiritual literature', The Cost of Discipleship and Life Together, as deviations from the exemplary activism that reached crescendo pitch in the anti-Hitler conspiracy and his goading the churches to responsible action against the state in the Ethics. These writings, however, were far from being 'devotional' detours. They reflect enduring, faith-filled sources of Bonhoeffer's inner stamina, his profound 'spirituality', without which he could never have persevered in his struggle against Nazism.

Discerning the rhythms of Bonhoeffer's 'spiritual strength', which is the focus of this study, brings us time and again to the intrinsic connection between prayer and action as expressed in his daily meditation on the biblical word, his efforts to form genuine Christian community, and his willingness to be led by God's grace to take Christlike risks to retrieve freedom and justice for a nation under the heel of a cruel dictatorship. These were the 'Powers for Good', to cite a phrase from one of his poems,1 that steadied him in his resistance to Nazism. They also distinguish his Christcentred spirituality from false piety and idolatrous religion.

Theology entered the Bonhoeffer household, embedded as it was in the culture of the German aristocracy, through Paula von Hase, Dietrich's mother. Her mother, a countess, had been a pupil of Franz Liszt and Klara Schumann. This undoubtedly found its way into the artistry Dietrich Bonhoeffer displayed in his piano playing. Paula von Hase's maternal grandfather, the painter Count von Kalckreuth, founded and directed the Academy of Fine Arts in Weimar. Her father, son of a professor of church history and historical theology, was a professor of practical theology. A distinctly political and somewhat 'anti-aristocratic' spirit entered into this tradition when Paula von Hase married Karl Bonhoeffer. The democratic republicanism, socialism and patriotism of the German Student Association, founded in 1815, were anticipated by the forebears of Dietrich's father. They had drawn the rulers' wrath and exacted the price of personal suffering of several of Dietrich's ancestors. Eberhard Bethge sums up this legacy and its significance for the young Bonhoeffer in these words:

Perhaps because they provide us with no self-evident hermeneutical key by which to understand them, Bonhoeffer's writings have served as 'a veritable Rorschach test' for late-modern theology. Yet they do not comprise a systematic theology, and even his longer writings did not appear according to any overall plan. One might conclude then that it is his remarkable life, not the substance of his thought and writing, that provides Bonhoeffer's legacy with its coherence, its integrity. But until now, despite the plethora of works that have been and still are being written about him, no one could judge the relative significance of the life and the work, lacking as we have the written legacy in its entirety.

At last, with the emergence of the Dietrich Bonhoeffer Werke (DBW) - and with the English translation of this critical edition (DBWE) well underway - we can view the entire written legacy, resisting all temptations to reduce Bonhoeffer's enduring significance to his remarkable biography alone. This literary estate now stands before us, virtually complete, demanding of students at least as much attention as they would grant the life, to which Bonhoeffer's works lend their testimony. His writings provide not only an example of intellectual and theological preparation for the reconstruction of German culture after the war but also a rare insight into the vanishing world of the old social and academic elites. His thought resonates with a prescience, subtlety and maturity that continually belies the youth of the thinker.

From the early 1930s; the Christian witness for peace was one of Dietrich Bonhoeffer's most consuming preoccupations; both intellectually and in action. In this, far from being a lone voice, he was but one of numerous Christians in many countries for whom the cause of peace, set against the tragic experience of 1914-18 and the resurgence of nationalism and militarism in the 1930s, was paramount. To isolate Bonhoeffer from the wider movement in which he took part, casting him in the role of sole prophet or hero, would not only be historically unreal; it would also obstruct the view of his distinctive contribution. It was in his sharp theological interaction with his partners in ecumenical peace-work, no less than in his opposition to the menacing political demons of his time, that his critical - and continuing - significance is to be seen. This chapter will concentrate on Bonhoeffer's theological contribution during the critical years 1932-4.

Prior to 1963 Dietrich Bonhoeffer was largely known in the English-speaking world as a martyr of the Confessing Church struggle (Kirchenkampf)in Germany, and the author of The Cost of Discipleship. The publication of Honest to God in 1963 in which Bishop John Robinson interpreted Bonhoeffer on the basis of his fragmentary theological reflections in prison, significantly changed this perception. Bonhoeffer became the radical theologian of secular Christianity and was even held responsible for the 'theology of the death of God' which became the rage in some circles at the time. This confusion about the significance of Bonhoeffer's life and thought was compounded by the apparent contradiction between his pacifism during the mid 1930s and his later involvement in the attempt to assassinate Adolf Hitler. Bonhoeffer was a riddle.

The controversy surrounding Honest to God none the less sparked off renewed interest in Bonhoeffer, especially in the English-speaking world. As his friend and biographer Eberhard Bethge later put it, Robinson's 'fascinatingly one-sided' interpretation of Bonhoeffer 'introduced the most fruitful period for the study, translation and publication of all of Bonhoeffer's works in the Protestant, Roman Catholic and secular spheres'.

The Germany of Dietrich Bonhoeffer's lifetime (1906-45) experienced three radical constitutional changes, all of which were to affect Bonhoeffer's formation in crucial ways. His first twelve years saw the Wilhelmine Empire (Kaiserreich), founded under Otto von Bismarck in 1871, reach the zenith of its power and then virtually self-destruct at the end of the First World War in 1918. The Kaiserreich was followed by Germany's first experiment in parliamentary democracy; the ill-fated Weimar Republic. It lasted from 1919 until 1933 when it also collapsed, or more accurately, was destroyed by a combination of hostile attacks from the anti-democratic forces of both the extreme left and the extreme right, on the one hand, and the political inexperience of the supporters of the constitution on the other. Then, out of the political and economic chaos of the end-phase of the Weimar years (1929-33), arose the National Socialist dictatorship of Adolf Hitler, the Third Reich. It was this latter manifestation of the German spirit which Bonhoeffer judged as essentially evil and which left him no alternative but to resist to the death.

It is not uncommon to find that the best-known writings of an author are the most difficult to examine. Familiarity produces its own 'readings' of a text, an audience already clear what its central content amounts to; and certainly clear about any impact the text may have made on them personally. Unlike some of Dietrich Bonhoeffer's earlier texts, the Letters and Papers from Prison have a place in the life of many who, perhaps as a result, come to want to study him further. It is Letters and Papers from Prison that are the home of those evocative phrases, 'a world come of age', 'the religious a priori and 'religionless Christianity', and therefore it is in Letters and Papers from Prison that those who have sought Bonhoeffer's support for their agenda for the interpretation of the Christian faith so as to take account of the changed thought patterns of the contemporary world have found it.

In the midst of these theological explorations there are other phrases of a profoundly evocative quality, such as the reference to God's being 'pushed out of the world on to the Cross',3 that have offered themselves for use in the devotion of many subsequent believers. Here also is an utterly engaging human story, with its insight into the way in which a particular person survived in the uncertain, frightening and potentially demoralising circumstances of imprisonment: we learn of his love for and a little of his taste in music, of the kind of life for which he longed and the way in which he managed the intense loneliness of his situation. At the heart of the letters is a warm human being, a passionate lover of life, with enough capacity to engage his readers (readers he never envisaged), even if they had no particular interest in theology.

Bonhoeffer provided the title of this chapter in his doctoral dissertation, Sanctorum Communio, when he said that theological doctrines such as creation, sin and revelation can only be fully understood in terms of sociality. If the venerable English word 'sociality' does not spring to our lips in everyday speech, that reflects the degree to which practical and philosophical individualism pervades modern Anglo-Saxon culture. But to use 'sociality' as a fundamental category to describe Dietrich Bonhoeffer's theology is not simply to distinguish German from American and British culture. The reason is essentially theological: 'the concepts of person, community and God are inseparably and essentially interrelated'.

This means that articulating a Christian understanding of human sociality is an inner-theological task. What 'person' and 'community' mean is a question of theological anthropology. It is not as if one could take an already developed interpretation of human social existence and then simply pour Christian content into it. For there are many different systems embedding competing world views: in the modern world, theories of social contract, civil rights, utilitarianism and Marxism have powerfully shaped economic and political systems, and the mentality and mores of whole populations. Similarly, philosophy from Aristotle to the Stoics and up to Idealist epistemology and Hegelianism have all developed views of human persons and social life.

From 1935 to 1937 Bonhoeffer ran an illegal seminary for the Confessing Church, first in Zingst; then in Finkenwalde in Pomerania. When it was closed down by the Gestapo, he wrote three books reflecting the teaching, ethos and methods of the seminary, namely The Cost of Discipleship, Life Together and The Prayerbook of the Bible: An Introduction to the Psalms. These books take us to the heart of the theological and practical preparation Bonhoeffer gave to the five sets of ordinands who went through the sixmonth- long courses. Life Together conflates descriptions of the seminary's common ordered life, influenced by monastic models, with theological explanation and spiritual advice. This book and The Cost of Discipleship are probably Bonhoeffer's most famous and influential writings, apart from Letters and Papers from Prison. The Prayerbook of the Bible (1940) was the last of his writings published in his lifetime.

As a Christmas gift to his brother-in-law Hans von Dohnanyi; fellow member of the conspiracy Hans Oster; and his closest friend Eberhard Bethge; Bonhoeffer penned an essay at the turn of the year 1942-3. Entitled 'After Ten Years', it was an account of lessons learnt in opposing Nazism across the decade following Hitler's rise to power in January 1933. Bonhoeffer speaks of feeling 'no ground under our feet' and of the shared experience that these friends straddled a 'turning-point in history', an epochal break in time. They had landed in that awkward place history sometimes serves up when 'every available alternative seem[s] equally intolerable' yet the shape of the future cannot be discerned. The way forward is not visible, even to the sage.

The subsection 'No ground under our feet' is followed by 'Who stands fast?' Bonhoeffer leads off with a blunt report: 'The great masquerade of evil has played havoc with all our ethical concepts.' Then he catalogues standard moral options generations have trusted, only to describe their destruction in the West as that had come to murderous expression under fascism. Appeals to 'reason', to 'moral fanaticism' (principled single-mindedness), to 'conscience' and to the paths of 'duty', 'freedom' and 'private virtuousness' had all crumbled as sure guides for living amidst turmoil and crisis.

Shortly after Dietrich Bonhoeffer's abrupt and tragic death on 9 April 1945, one of his long-standing friends, Reinhold Niebuhr, paid him the ultimate tribute in an article entitled The Death of a Martyr'. The story of Bonhoeffer', Niebuhr wrote, 'is worth recording. It belongs to the modern acts of the apostles.' Niebuhr went on to predict that

In the past half-century this prediction has become true not only within the boundaries of Bonhoeffer's native Germany, but also far beyond.

Bonhoeffer's life is a story of family solidarity, of faith and faithfulness, of courage and compassion and of true patriotism. Moreover, Bonhoeffer's life is a necessary key to understanding his theology. The numerous writings which flowed from his creative pen can most effectively be interpreted when seen in the unfolding context of his life and times. In sum, biography inevitably sheds light on the foundational themes of his theology and is an interpretative key in reaching the depths of meaning in his writing.

Emerson has been called many things, but except by theological stalwarts outraged by the Divinity School “Address,” “radical” has seldom been one of them. Disposed by taste and training to the rule of gentlemen, he was appalled by the Jacksonian rabble even as he saw it impelled by a feeling of human worth much like his own. Emerson's practical politics were instinctively conservative; the political coloring of his writings is harder to assess. It was once commonplace to observe that the literary Emerson had no politics at all and little sense of history as progressive or teleological. Nature and the Soul were timeless; only the outward costumes and idioms changed. More recently, Emerson has been historicized by embedding him within an American world “poised,” as Carolyn Porter has said, “on the verge of the most accelerated capitalist development in modern history.” Surely no contemporary registered the new economic forces more acutely than Emerson did. Yet if the Emerson of the 1940s and 'SOS was construed as loftily indifferent to the currents of the age, the Emerson of the 1980s and '90s has been portrayed as ideologically captive to them.

Explicit or implicit in nearly everything Emerson wrote is the conviction that nature bats last, that nature is the law, the final word, the supreme court. Others have believed - still believe - that the determining force in our lives is grace, or that it is the state - the polis, the community - or that it is the past. More recently it has been argued that the central force is economics or race or sex or genetics. Emerson's basic teaching is that the fundamental context of our lives is nature. Emerson's definition of nature is a broad one. Nature is the way things are. Philosophically, Emerson says, the universe is made up of nature and the soul, or nature and consciousness. Everything that is not me is nature; nature thus includes nature (in the common sense of the green world), art, all other persons, and my own body.